Updates, inspiration, and musings from the folks behind Trello.

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Trello is here

Do you have a whiteboard covered in Post-it notes somewhere in your office?

Yeah. Honestly, with all the fancy-schmancy “project management” software out there, I never found a way to keep track of who’s supposed to be working on what and what the highest priority projects are and what their status is. As the founder of two companies it was starting to get distracting to walk down the hallways seeing dozens of people getting paid to sit at computers, type on keyboards, occasionally move a mouse, and I had no idea if they were doing the exact right thing, or maybe something they thought was important but which, nevertheless, was not, actually, important.

So we built Trello.

Trello is a brand new product from Fog Creek Software. We’ve had a team working on it for nine months, and we’ve been dogfooding it almost the whole time, and I have to say, it’s really great, so as of today, Trello.com is live, open, free, available to the entire public through the great medium of the global network of computers known as the Internet, hallelujah.

Trello is probably the simplest thing in the world: it’s a web page where you make a bunch of lists. Each list contains cards. Each card is a thing that someone might want to work on.

It’s on the web. Each Trello board has a URL, and you can invite anyone you want to participate. Whenever anybody makes a change, everyone else sees it, instantly.

You can move cards around. Move them up and down to prioritize:

Move them around from list to list:

You can attach people to cards. That’s a way of showing who is working on which thing.

Now, the cool thing is that on the back of each card, there’s room for all kinds of cool stuff, including a description, conversations, file attachments, links, checklists, labels, and more.

That way cards can carry all kinds of useful stuff around with them.

If it seems too simple to be true, well, it is. It’s just a list of lists, really. But the simplicity is deceptive: it turns out to be a super-powerful way to organize teams, projects, and, in fact, anything that needs a little organization.

You can use it all by yourself. I use it as a kind of super-GTD todo list, but I’ve also given access to Producer Alex and occasionally, when he’s not paying attention, I assign him to something I was failing to get done on my own, and then it gets done. Thanks, Alex!

You can use it on a team. Sales teams can use it to track leads. Software teams can use it to track features. VC firms can use it to track startups. If you ever find yourself asking, “Who’s supposed to be working on X?” your team needs Trello.

Trello works on any size screen. It works great on smart phones (there’s even an iPhone app) and it works great on laptops. We even set up a giant video wall with five 42″ plasma screens mainly for Trello.

Everything synchronizes instantly. You can hold a conference call with your remote teammates, all go to the same board, and update things while you talk about them.

It’s free. (We might charge something for premium features in the future). You can make one board or 100. Sign up today!